LinuxMusicians

I've finally gotten around to taking a hard look at Reaper and I like what I see. This midi tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04JR_sLxGbc shows that Reaper does midi editing in a way I'd be comfortable with and the manual outlines the ability to set and change keybindings, which is a really nice feature. And of course, the price is very attractive.

But, I'm finding very few positive comments about running it on Linux. I'm not worried about most of the complaints as they are about Jack and VSTi's with which I doubt I'll have a problem.

I have seen a couple of people say it just doesn't run well on Linux (in Wine) though, but I've also seen a couple that say it does.

Are there any happy Reaper users here?

AnthonyCFox wrote:Are there any happy Reaper users here?

I'm a registered owner but I haven't kept up wth the program for years. It ran very well under Wine when I did use it, but its UI is not amenable to my workflow. Its VST support was good, and it seemed stable at the time. If it does what you want, go for it, whether on Win or Wine.

It also has extensive documentation.

It's not open source, not GPL, and not native Linux. Those are of course non-musical aspects but they are important to some of us. For me though it simply didn't suit my creative purposes.

Best,

dp

Running perfect here since a few years. don´t need my windows partition anymore.

I've never used Reaper but it has a free demo you can try. kxstudio comes with the demo pre-installed. So give it a try and report back what you find.

I tried it a few times on my Debian Squeeze with wine-rt from Tangostudio repos. I didn't have any problem, seemed to be very stable.

varpa wrote:I've never used Reaper but it has a free demo you can try. kxstudio comes with the demo pre-installed. So give it a try and report back what you find.

"Free" as in beer, but learning a new DAW takes time and energy; plus I need to install wine-rt and all that. I wanted an idea as to whether it was worth the effort. It sounds like it is.

i'm a registered user and i use it through wine for serious sample manipulation work (i.e. anything requiring really good timestretching).
i have done a few MIDI-only tracks in it as well. want to explore it more for general production work.

haven't had any major issues under wine. only problems have been nitpicky and potentially related to my odd window manager choice (dwm).

I thought they would come up with a native linux version?

studio32 wrote:I thought they would come up with a native linux version?

The last I've seen about that was in March. So unless they're doing it in secret, it's on hiatus.

It's only been two days, but I'm really likin' Reaper so far.

One of my tests for advanced pieces of software is to guess at what it should be able to do then do a google search for that function. I thought Reaper should be able to insert chords in the piano roll and while that isn't a native function, there is a user hack for it that only took a couple minutes to implement. Sweet! It will do arpeggios and scales also.

I found a really nice free synth too, the "Tyrell N6". I've been having good luck installing vsts, four out of five have worked. Though two of them I knew would, as I'd installed them before.

My initial screwing around just to see how it works is turning into a piece of music that is already almost as long as anything I've done with any other software DAW setup. Though, to be fair, my experience with Ardour, Rosegarden, Non, etc., have given me a certain foundation of knowledge that I wouldn't have had if I had tried Reaper two years ago.

Reaper itself is not free software but its main underlying library - WDL - is FLOSS. It is WDL that needs better Linux support before the native Linux version becomes a usable reality. Its clearly not a priority for the devs though as I don't think any work on improving Linux support has happened in about a year now.

I've got the x64 version running nicely under KXStudio amd64 here. If there is another KX iso release and it still includes Reaper, I hope F includes the 64bit build with the 64bit ISO.

I'm running Arch and except for having to work around the technically correct, but user unfriendly implementation of Python in Arch, LinReaper worked great.

I've played around a bit with Reaper included in KXStudio 12.04.3
Working nicely so far, I'd say. Wineasio, JACK, my Firewire device (Presonus FP10) are all doing what they're supposed to.

Just a few questions in case somebody can help.

How can I update Reaper? Is it safe to just download their installer and run it in WINE thus replacing the current version?
Also, I couldn't find the current install anywhere under ~/.wine

What about 64Bit Reaper (in 64Bit KXStudio)? Should I prefer that if I don't use 32Bit VSTs?

Oh, and the font in Reaper's timeline looks awful. I already installed msttcorefonts but no improvement.

Thanks for any help. Would be great to eliminate these issues.
It's a fantastic DAW, despite its limitations in WINE, in a fantastic distro.

PatS wrote:How can I update Reaper? Is it safe to just download their installer and run it in WINE thus replacing the current version?
Also, I couldn't find the current install anywhere under ~/.wine

I'm using Arch and I used LinReaper to install. To update with that you run LinReaper again. Downloading and running the installer from reaper.fm probably won't work if KxStudio is using anything like LinReaper. There are a lot of tweaks to get Reaper working properly that using LinReaper or KxStudio will take care of for you.

You might want to check ~/.local/reaper for a Reaper specific .wine directory. LinReaper creates it's own subdirectory there and I assume the KxStudio installer is similar.

You might get a better response posting to the KxStudio sub-forum http://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewforum.php?f=47

OK, thanks a lot!
I'm tempted to try it on Arch (which I used for a while some time ago) but I guess I'll stick with KX for now.